SilverLight 4, RIA Services, MEF and MVVM, oh my… A four part series from the mind of Shawn Wildermuth (updated for VS2010/SL4 RTM)

Shawn Wildermuth - Updated RIA Services + MVVM Example

“A few months I wrote a series of articles on using RIA Services in a structured MVVM application. The article series was more of a thinking-out-loud exercise than a tutorial, but it makes and interesting read. Here are the four parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Now that Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 have RTM'd.  I've updated the example to the latest bits.  You can get it here:

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Shawn Wildermuth - Architecting Silverlight 4 with RIA Services, MEF and MVVM - Part 1

“Recently I blogged about Brad Abrams' PDC RIA Services Talk and complained about the data source functionality. While the drag-n-drop ability in RIA Services is interesting, I believe that it may be a bad approach for all but the smallest of projects (or one-off projects). In that comments of that article, I promised to show you how I would architect a Silverlight solution with RIA Services.

The outcome of that work is a sample that I will cover in a series of blog posts (starting with this one) to explain not only how i'd use RIA Services in Silverlight 4, but also how to solve some of the basic difficulties with those types of architectures. I will be covering how I integrated the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and Laurent Bugnion's MVVM Light Framework to stitch together a loosely coupled Silverlight application.  But let's start with RIA Services.

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Shawn Wildermuth - Architecting SL4 Applications with RIA Services, MEF and MVVM - Part 2

“If you've been following this blog, you know that earlier this week I released the first part of the series oon how to architect your Silverlight 4 projects. In this second part, I want to show you how the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) can aid in that process.

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Shawn Wildermuth - Architecting SL4 Applications with RIA Services, MEF and MVVM - Part 3

“In the first part of this series, I looked at how WCF RIA Services can work in an MVVM architecture. In the second part, I looked at how you could use the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to aid in composing an MVVM application. Now comes the third and last part of the series.  In this part, I will focus on some common problems integrating MVVM and composed user interfaces (that are common to most of these situations, not just using WCF RIA Services). I will show you some refactoring of the MEF design from last article as well as show you how using a framework (I used Laurent Bugnion's MVVM Light framework (v3 Alpha)) can help you smooth out the rough edges of implementing MVVM.

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Shawn Wildermuth - Architecting SL4 Apps with RIA Services, MEF and MVVM - Part 4 (of 3)

“Welcome the part 4 of my three-part series on architecting with RIA Services. In the last part of the series, I thought I was done with the example and some of my readers challenged me to help them understand how to handle Add/Delete scenarios. Since I was at it, I figured I should show paging and IsDirty scenarios as well, I decided to make a part four.

Remember this example is based on my current thoughts, its not dogma. I will change my mind at times and learn from the community (as has even happened during this series).  Hopefully this example can help you think about how the patterns match your current business problems. No tithe, no sermon, no damnation....I promise ;)

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Shawn’s style is refreshing (i.e. hey, this works for me, and it may work for you too. If not, that’s cool too) and I dig the content. RIA Services is interesting and worth watching (and of course MEF/MVVM rock too  :)